Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed — Yesterday, it could be said that FriendFeed “tipped”, as TechMeme's Gabe Rivera put it. Dozens of visible FriendFeed users reported getting an unprecedented swarm of subscriptions by new friends, and the site gained incredible exposure via comments …

EXCLUSIVE - Rosedale to step down as Linden Lab CEO — Linden Lab Chief Executive Philip Rosedale said on Friday the company he founded has begun a search for a new CEO with more operational and management expertise. — Rosedale will become chairman of the Linden Lab board when his successor is found …

Changing my Job — We've decided to search for a new CEO, and I wanted to briefly talk to everyone here about the reasons for that decision. — I feel that the most important contributions I have made and will continue to make to Second Life are related to building both the product …

Facebook To Launch Instant Messaging Service — Facebook has been testing a new instant messaging service and will be launching it to the public soon, perhaps in the next week. — Our understanding is that the service will be built into user's Facebook pages and allow them to web chat with their Facebook friends.

Imagine There's a MicroHoo (It's Easy if You Try) — OK, we Photoshopped it, but only because we could not get our head around what the official Yahoo/Microsoft post-merger picture might look like. — With news that the pair were in informal talks, first broken by CNET …

Apple to iPhone App Store applicants: Just hang tight — It's never easy to get a Dear John letter, but it can sting a little more when you're getting the same letter as everyone else. Such is the case with the first wave of iPhone App Store “rejection” letters that Apple is now sending out to developers.

Google Sucks Life Out of Old Media: Check Out The 2007 Share Shift — For the past few quarters, we've analyzed the amazing rate at which advertising spending is moving online. Now we're able to look at full-year 2007. — Specifically, we analyzed the change in US advertising revenue at 17 major media companies from 2006 and 2007.

SXSW: Not Much to Twitter About — Plenty has been said about my interview with Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe that's because there wasn't much else at the conference to talk about — I'm just back from four days in sunny Austin, Tex., where I attended the South by Southwest Interactive Conference …

What if Apple really opened up the iPhone? — Will Android beat iPhone? — Speaking yesterday at the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Rich Miner, Google group manager for mobile platforms, predicted that sales of Android-based devices will outpace those of the iPhone.

Blu-ray Blues — Now that HD DVD is dead and Sony's Blu-ray has apparently won the HD media war, why aren't we seeing Blu-ray drives available as a factory option, at least, for Macintosh computers? I think Steve Jobs is deliberately holding back in a high-stakes gamble for control of HD video distribution.

YouTube Videos in High Quality — You may have noticed that we're now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We're making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you'll find a greater percentage …

Wundrbar: A Smart Search and Account Management Tool — Among the Y Combinator startups we rounded up earlier today is one that finally brings some innovation to the standard Google search bar most of us have set as our homepages. — Wundrbar will remind some readers of YubNub, the so-called …

The RateMyCop Saga — So even as police departments across the country are setting up sex offender registries, drug offender registries, and posting the mugs and names of suspected johns online, they also took a great deal umbrage early this month when Gino Sesto set up a site called RateMyCop.com.

How we improved performance on Google Code — If you're a frequent visitor to code.google.com for product updates and reference materials for Google APIs you're working with, you might have noticed that the page loading time (or page rendering time depending on how you see it) has reduced in varying degrees in the past several weeks.